2001 Leonids: Meteors in Perspective
Credit & Copyright:
Christophe Marlot
The 2001 Leonid storm was so intense that the
meteor shower's
radiant, the point on the sky
from which the fleeting trails
seemed to diverge,
was easy to spot.
But the bits of debris that created the meteors really
moved along parallel paths, following the orbit of
their parent comet Tempel-Tuttle.
Their apparent divergence from the shower's radiant point was simply due to
perspective as
skygazers looked
toward the stream of cosmic debris.
During the 2001 Leonid storm, while the radiant was above
the horizon from
SoBaekSan Observatory
in South Korea, astronomer
Christophe Marlot made this single time exposure recording
star trail arcs and a number of meteors.
Since Marlot was looking away from the cosmic debris stream,
this perspective
actually shows red tinged meteor trails converging
toward a point
below the horizon and opposite the radiant -- the
Leonid shower's antiradiant.